![\"@mikejonesmelb](\"http:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/Screen-Shot-2015-07-21-at-3.44.29-pm.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAccurate, but otherwise\u00a0not an auspicious start. Those who follow me will also note I’m still using the same profile picture. I will leave it up to you to decide whether this qualifies as ‘effective branding’ or simply laziness.<\/p>\n
Over the past few years Twitter has become a significant part of my life. There is a tendency sometimes to think of social media as time wasting, as something you do instead of life; and many (me included)\u00a0use\u00a0the acronym IRL (in real life) when talking about meeting people offline. So as I pass the 20,000 milestone it’s a good time to write a little\u00a0about my own time\u00a0in the\u00a0wonderful, expansive, and sometimes infuriating Twitterverse.<\/p>\n
Like many, I started slowly. With almost no followers, and following a short list of large organisations, archives, libraries and a few friends and colleagues, it was\u00a0difficult to get a timeline flowing, let alone any steady interactions. I dipped in and out, each time shrugging and moving on.<\/p>\n
Then, in March 2012, I attended the inaugural conference of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities<\/a>\u00a0(AADH) in Canberra. There were many people there I knew, and lots of tweeters, so I threw myself into the hashtag and it was a revelation. I expanded the list of people I was following (and my own list of followers gradually started to grow), held online conversations during and between sessions with people I had never met, and watched as sessions were enhanced or critiqued with a flurry of references, links and interactions on the Twitter backchannel<\/a>.<\/p>\n Following the AADH conference, I started to visit Twitter nearly every day. Aside from a few friends, my main focus was professional, and my Following\/Followers lists remain\u00a0skewed toward archives, libraries, museums and galleries (GLAM), as well as historians, academics and researchers of various sorts. With very few exceptions I don’t follow bands, musicians, writers, actors, or other ‘famous people’, mostly because they clutter up my timeline; and I get most of what I need from the people I follow already.<\/p>\n I continue to use Twitter professionally, to find out about developments in the GLAM sector, interesting research, blog posts and articles, and to build professional networks. There are colleagues I have met as a result, and colleagues\u00a0I am keen\u00a0to meet when I have the opportunity. I have talked about project ideas, sought advice (and given it), found help, and become involved in paid work, all as a result of online interactions. Plus I still tweet frequently at conferences, both as a way of engaging with others and to capture notes and links I can refer to later; and I regularly follow the hashtags of conferences I am unable to attend.<\/p>\n Perhaps most significantly, I gradually revealed more of\u00a0myself. Now I don’t only tweet about work, archives and study – mine is a hybrid professional\/personal account, including tweets about music, politics, social issues, travel, and whatever else is happening in my life, punctuated by the occasional multi-tweet rant. I have built an online network of people I socialise with, including a growing number I have subsequently met offline, and there are a number of\u00a0people I am yet to meet face-to-face who I interact with more frequently than I do with my family and nearly all my ‘non-Twitter’ friends.<\/p>\n I have talked, shared, joked, laughed, and cried, just as I have been angered, maddened and saddened by the way some people act, on Twitter and off.\u00a0All of which sounds like RL to me.<\/p>\n @mikejonesmelb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As soon as I publish this post I’m going to head over to Twitter and send out\u00a0the link with my 20,000th tweet. Here was my first. Accurate, but otherwise\u00a0not an auspicious start. Those who follow me will also note I’m… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[154,155],"class_list":["post-897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-online-resources","tag-social-media","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2X6WE-et","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=897"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":906,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions\/906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikejonesonline.com\/contextjunky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}